They came to the crest of a hill, and the shape of the land beyond was only vaguely familiar. The path now moved downhill, as did the tiny trails left by rivulets of water that had run along this path. Rain that fell on this side of the hill flowed down to a different stream from the one that drank in the rain that fell on the hill’s other side. I had traveled here only when called to heal someone who was sick or injured.
I placed cupped hands around her mouth and called out, “May we walk!” She called it out several times. There was no response.
I started down the path. She turned her head to see Lightfoot Watcher following, her daughter not far behind. She was impressed by the way the daughter had given up play for the path. To have such a daughter.
Late in the afternoon they met up with a woman. She sat in a clearing where many trees had been felled. She leaned against a rock, enjoying the last touch of sunlight while an infant nursed from her teat. A naked boy ran around the rock and yelled at his mother, who occasionally watched him run.
The woman recognized the healer, who had come this way last winter when the bones in her mother’s body had hurt so badly that she could not walk. The healer’s music had given the mother some peace, but since she could not have music every waking moment, she went out one night to fall asleep in the snow. The healer, because she had not truly healed, refused any gift beyond the food necessary to return home.
“Where are you going?”
“To the Many Huts,” said I.
“Whatever grows in the woods is yours to eat, whatever runs on four hooves is yours to eat, whatever swims through the water is yours to eat, and whatever wood lies free is yours to burn.”
I offered the same for where she lived. “Whatever solitude you may still have with children is yours again,” said I, ready to leave.
“Healer,” said the woman, rising as one did when things were serious. “I have heard talk of a strange animal who wears strange skins. I have heard of a woman with a daughter and a son who was followed by this animal and who gave it meat and fruit so it would not kill them.”
I said she would be careful, and the three left. Lightfoot Watcher thought it odd that the woman had not heard of the rock that had fallen from the sky or of the animal inside it.
“A woman from this part of the world keeps to herself. Each knows the paths and the flowers and the animals and where I live, but not much else seems of interest.”
“Is there a third animal?”
“I don’t know.”
Before nightfall they settled in a clearing, built a fire, and ate the rest of the food they had brought with them. They had seen no one else. Lightfoot Watcher’s daughter asked what the Many Huts would be like, and Lightfoot Watcher said she did not know. “My mother never did her wisdom. What worth, she said to me, is wisdom if you have to travel many days to find it and many days more to return with it?”
The daughter looked to I. “Have you seen it?”
“Yes. And once we find a lightfoot to take with us, you will see it, too. Your eyes should see it before your ears hear words about it.”
The Eleventh Day
Neither I nor Lightfoot Watcher knew the area, so neither knew where lightfoot were most likely to graze. Now each woman moved as quietly as leaves caught by the breeze, but the daughter had never liked to play the quiet hunter, so she was prone to step on fallen branches or shout in excitement when she came face-to-face with a bushytail searching the ground for nuts. They followed the contour of the land until they reached a stream, and walked along the stream until they came to a clearing full of grasses. They must have been too loud, because the clearing was empty. But there were plenty of tracks. Lightfoot Watcher’s daughter now took each step with greater care, and there was more quiet than before. The animal talk and bird talk became louder. It did not take long to find fresh spore, track the lightfoot, shoot several arrows into him, and track down his weakening body.
By sunset the body was butchered and the meat was being smoked above the fire. Over the course of the afternoon, several women came by, and each in turn was offered a portion of food. Except for one woman who kept hinting she wanted more, each returned half the portion she had been offered after she heard that the healer was going to the Many Huts.
That night, after Lightfoot Watcher’s daughter had curled up to sleep, Lightfoot Watcher complained to I that everything hurt. I sang several healing songs, which did little good.
“These aches will stay until I give birth.” Lightfoot Watcher sighed, then patted her enormous belly. “I wonder if the first one is too scared to come out.”
A silence hung around the fire. The words angered I. She knew what Lightfoot Watcher was saying with such innocent words: the first one was scared of coming out and never breathing. I wanted to say that it had not breathed, it had no true body, so it could not truly be scared, that only Lightfoot Watcher was scared. But she had felt both infants kick while she had sung, and she didn’t believe. And because she could not direct her anger at Lightfoot Watcher, she explained to Lightfoot Watcher her anger at Huggable, who had teats and no infant, who had killed a man, and who did not leave even though Nightskin had threatened her death.
“She should leave,” said Lightfoot Watcher. “I think Nightskin would track her down.”
“What kind of woman would do that?”
“Nightskin is a woman but she is not a woman.”
“You mean she is ugly?”
“No. I am scared of her because she is like a man.”
“She is large. She has almost-pouches under her throat. But she is a woman. Arm Scars said Nightskin mated with the almost-a-man she called Clever Fingers. You heard her share the same words. Arm Scars said there was an infant growing within.”
“Arm Scars spoke to me before she left. She told me that Nightskin was a man as well as a woman. When Nightskin was born, her mother did not have the heart to bury her.”
“Did Arm Scars wish her mother had buried Nightskin?”
“She did not say. But Arm Scars was happy that Nightskin was not returning to the river’s mouth.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It sounded like an anger story. While you were gone, she told several anger stories, and I stopped believing what she said. But this huggable woman is frightened. Say again what Huggable said to you, and you will hear Arm Scars’ story even though Huggable never told it.”
That night Lightfoot Watcher told her daughter a story:
There was a woman who lived near a small lake. On the other side of the lake lived another woman with her daughter. Every day the first woman could see the other one. The first one did not like this lack of solitude. She did not like the way the other one drank from the same water she did.
When her desire came, she mated with one man and another as a woman should. One night, when she felt her body open to take in the man’s pollen, she became sick with hatred of the other woman. She asked her mate if he would promise something. The mate was sweaty with desire. He said he would promise anything. She asked him to destroy the other woman’s hut.
A promise made while one is willfully mating close to another is not a promise to break.
The next day the man destroyed the hut, and that night and the next night and the next he mated with the first woman.
The first woman gave birth to a daughter, and the daughter suckled the first woman’s teat, and the daughter grew, and seasons passed. When the daughter was as tall as the mother, she felt desire, and she mated one man after another. When she knew she was old enough to have a child, she left her mother and found another small lake to live by.
On the other side of the lake lived a woman and her son. The daughter did not like to see the woman and her son every day. She did not like that each drank from the same water as she. She felt a terrible rage.
When the daughter felt her desire, she mated with one man then with another. When her desire was strong and a man’s belly pressed hard against her back, she a
sked him to make a promise, and he said he would. She asked him to kill the other woman.
The next morning the daughter awoke and was horrified by what she had asked. A man had no arrows, no spear. He had only a knife, and he would have to get mating close to kill. What she had asked was truly terrible.
The daughter ran to the other side of the lake to warn the woman. The woman despised her words. The daughter had asked for something horrible, and she had betrayed the man she had asked. The woman went to find another woman to help her slay the man.
When the man arrived in the clearing, he saw the daughter. Behind the daughter was the woman and another woman. The daughter told the man to go away. She did not want him to do something evil. The man wanted to turn, but each woman there knew he had made a promise. If he turned away, no woman would mate with him again.
He held his knife firm and ran at the woman he had promised to kill. The woman and the other each fired an arrow. The man was killed.
Each woman who lived near any of the small lakes was told that the daughter had killed the man. No woman shared words or food with her, not even her mother. The daughter lived long enough to give birth to a son, but during the winter she could not find enough food to feed them both. Each soon died.
“Why do you feel bad?” the daughter asked Lightfoot Watcher. “Why do you tell me such a story?”
I did not listen to Lightfoot Watcher’s response. She was thinking of Huggable and her daughter. And then she was thinking about the daughter she did not have, how there was no one to watch her play the gzaet the way she had watched her mother.
When I was still small, she had watched her mother play, and she had tried so hard to memorize the order her mother had pressed down the keys. When her mother was off gathering, when she was too far away to hear, I had tried to play some of the musics. Once her mother snuck up on her as quietly as a nightskin, and she struck I for playing the gzaet. She struck her across the back, across the head, across the arms. She yelled foul, angry words. And while I sat there, crying, her body sore from all the hitting, her mother said softly, “You have to wait. You have to watch and learn. When you first touch the gzaet, you have to touch but not play. There is wisdom when you don’t press down on the keys.” So I listened and watched and touched the keys when her mother was gone and played the gzaet when she was sure her mother was too far away. When I was almost as tall as her mother, her mother placed the gzaet in front of I and said, “Play just the top keys. Play me a song for the ears.”
The Twelfth Day
It was a hazy morning, and it seemed the sun would never burn away the smokiness. The Many Huts was no longer something you stepped into, the way you stepped into a clearing; the mist had made it a part of the forest.
I and Lightfoot Watcher and her daughter walked the outside paths of the Many Huts. In four different spots a pole—each carved from a thick, straight sapling—had been driven into the ground. At the top of each pole rested a smooth, unmarked pot that was held in place by several wooden pegs. The lip of the pot was just above I’s head, and she had to use both her hands to place a portion of meat inside each one. Sometime later any woman who came to the Many Huts and cleared it of debris would take a portion.
Before a woman could enter a hut and seek out its wisdom, she had to do the same work. Lightfoot Watcher’s legs hurt, and she did not feel she could bend over. She sat against a tree at the edge of the Many Huts while her daughter removed fallen leaves and branches from the gutters and the paths. I made her way along the paths, uprooting seedlings that had sprouted, all the while glancing into the shadowed openings of each hut and wondering, Is it in this hut that I’ll find wisdom about the animal?
The mist rose from the ground, stretched out, and disappeared, and the sun struck the huts from above, making it look as if a sun were inside each one, or as if each were inhabited by something almost alive, a true body, perhaps, who had refused to leave the earth because it feared the complete solitude that awaited it in the sky.
The trees of the forest became a distant wall that surrounded the area, the colors of the leaves just beginning to change. I looked* around, and she was surprised that the Many Huts was so big. Now that she was grown, she had thought it would look smaller than it had when she was a girl and had come here with her mother.
Each hut was as well built as the one Roofer had made for her. Trails moved in and around the huts like a winding river, so that a woman could walk through one hut and another and never be seen by another woman in a nearby hut. I considered how many women had made their wisdom, how many huts had been built, and how each hut had been made so well that a woman could live in it. What would it be like if people lived this close together? Could a woman behave respectfully enough so each person would have her solitude, so someone wouldn’t let her eyes go wide and stare at someone whose eyes were also wide. She couldn’t imagine it; it would be as it had been on the hillside overlooking the rock: wide eyes, strong words, and death.
Lightfoot Watcher’s daughter stopped her work and knelt down on the ground. “Look here,” she said. “There are tracks like the ones the animal made.”
They did look like the animal’s tracks. There was the straight line in the middle, and the heel cutting more of an impression than the ball of the feet. The trail was covered with these tracks; this animal had left and returned to the Many Huts a number of times. Lightfoot Watcher’s daughter had picked out a very fresh track, and I traced it with the tip of her finger. It made an impression like the animal’s track, but the curve was somewhat different. It could be a different animal with a different kind of sandal, but the shape of this curve had a familiarity to it.
The fresh trail led directly to a hut several steps away from them. I rose and listened. The only sounds came from the forest. She called out, “I am here. Another is here. Her daughter is here. Who are you?”
There was no answer.
Lightfoot Watcher was walking down the path now, each step careful and quiet, as if she were tracking a lightfoot. The bow she should have left behind at the tree was held in an outstretched arm. The quiver of arrows hung over her shoulder. I wanted to wave to her in some way that would make Lightfoot Watcher put down the bow. Nightskin had made threats with her arrows. Huggable had aimed her arrows too readily. I didn’t like the way an arrow had changed its meaning since the rock had fallen from the sky, but at the same time, she was fearful of someone who would sit quietly in a shelter and not answer a woman’s call.
I stepped toward the hut. Both the daughter and Lightfoot Watcher matched her step for step, the mother’s free hand reaching back to take an arrow out of the quiver.
I entered the hut. She did not notice what kind of wisdom was sheltered by the roof and the walls. Sitting in the far corner was an almost-a-man. He had a man’s rough skin, and his throat pouches were just beginning to hang down. His skin and his hair were darker than any she had seen on a man before. She could not tell his size because he sat with knees drawn up to his chest, his hands clasped in front. His entire body was covered in skins the color of muddy water. The skins were thin as leaves, just like the skins worn by the second animal. Beside him was a large bag of the same color. His cheeks and hands had been cut and scratched; lines of dried blood looked like poorly made scars. The almost-a-man did not avert his eyes, but he did thin them so that he did not give I a full stare. He moved his head just a bit, so his half-closed eyes could focus on what stood to I’s side. It was Lightfoot Watcher, the arrow in her bow drawn.
“I am I. I live near the Winding River, and I heal people who ask me to. We have come to the Many Huts to learn some of its wisdom.”
The almost-a-man, the stranger who wore skins like the second animal, said nothing.
“Where are you from?”
“Far away.” He spoke the words carefully, as if I might not understand. There was a strange sound to them, but they were just words.
“How far?”
“Very far. I live in a place
like this.”
“You live in a Many Huts?”
“Yes.”
Lightfoot Watcher leaned forward and said, “Go away.”
I found herself frightened by the violence in Lightfoot Watcher’s voice. I wanted to use different words, but she did not know what kind of words to offer this strange almost-a-man. What Lightfoot Watcher said did make sense, and no man would dare argue with a woman sided by another woman.
This one didn’t argue. He waited. He sat and waited and he cast his eyes on her, then on Lightfoot Watcher. I didn’t know what he was thinking, and this was unsettling. He stared and he waited. Lightfoot Watcher had already averted her eyes, which made it impossible for I to turn her head again. She greeted his stare, first feeling respect for the Stranger, then anxiety, then disgust. He stared as if this were his hut, his place to demand solitude‚ and this bothered her more than the two animals who had inhabited the rock.
I said, “Go away.”
The Stranger at last showed a sliver of respect. He bowed his head and looked down at his knees. Looking up at them, he had seemed defiant; now, curled up, he looked defenseless. “I would go away.” There was a pause. A proper pause. His hands, I noticed, were like an infant’s hands. The fingers were so perfectly shaped. There was no sign that this man had ever built a nest, shaped wood, or fought over where he could walk. His hands made him appear harmless. Lightfoot Watcher lowered the bow.
“I would go away,” said the Stranger, “but I am looking for something.”
Something? A man might look for food, or for a mate, or for the materials to build something, but what specific thing would a man look for that would take him to a place so far away from where he lived that no one here had seen such skins?
“There is a creature here. It walks on two legs, like a person. It shapes things with two hands like a person. It has a head shaped like a person’s head, with thin eyes, a large nose, and a mouth. But it looks and acts nothing like a person.”
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